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Pope Francis defensive on sex abuse scandal as commission lags

By Nicole WinfieldThe Associated Press

Posted:
03/06/2014 12:01:00 AM MST

Pope Francis attends his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square on Wednesday. Francis has said that "no one else has done more" than the Catholic Church to root out pedophilia in the clergy. (Andreas Solaro, AFP/Getty Images)

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis is receiving increasing criticism that he simply doesn't get it when it comes to handling sex abuse.

Three months after the Vatican announced a commission of experts to study best practices on protecting children, no action has been taken, no members appointed and no statute outlining the commission's scope approved.

Francis hasn't met with any victims, hasn't moved to oust a bishop convicted in 2012 of failing to report a suspected abuser and on Wednesday insisted that the church had been unfairly attacked on abuse, using the defensive rhetoric of the Vatican from a decade ago.

Victims' advocates said his tone was archaic and urged Francis to show the same compassion he offers the sick, the poor and disabled to people who were raped by priests when they were children.

"Under Pope Francis, the Vatican continues to deny its role in creating and maintaining a culture where upholding the reputation of the church is prioritized over the safety of children," said Maeve Lewis, executive director of the Irish victims' support group One in Four.

To be sure, Francis adores children like a father — it's on display every Wednesday during his general audience — and he has continued to defrock pedophile priests.

But unlike Pope Benedict XVI, he has rarely spoken out about abuse, indicating it clearly has not been a priority in his first year as pope. Instead, he has focused on introducing the world to his merciful vision of the church and reforming the Vatican bureaucracy.

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The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Wednesday that the upheaval of those reforms had delayed getting the commission off the ground. He said there was no doubt it would, and that it would eventually propose new initiatives to protect children and be a model for the church and society at large.

Francis has only spoken out a few times on abuse, and his toughest words weren't even pronounced. He apparently scrapped his prepared Dec. 2 speech to bishops from the Netherlands, who have been dealing with revelations that about 20,000 children were sexually abused in Dutch Catholic institutions over the past 65 years. Instead, Francis spoke to the bishops off-the-cuff.

On Jan. 31, Francis did mention his new sex abuse commission in a speech to the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which handles sex abuse cases. In his final words before imparting his blessing, he said children must always be protected and that he wants his new sex abuse study commission to be a model.

"For a year we've been saying that while Pope Francis is making progress on church finance and governance he's done nothing — literally nothing — that protects a single child, exposes a single predator or prevents a single coverup," said Barbara Dorris of the main U.S. victim's group SNAP.

Francis was asked about protecting children by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in an interview.

Francis acknowledged the "profound" wounds abuse leaves and credited Benedict with having turned the church around. Benedict in 2001 took over handling abuse cases because bishops were moving pedophiles around rather than punishing them. He updated the Vatican's in-house norms and, in his final two years as pope, defrocked nearly 400 priests himself.

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